How To Choose CD/DVD Archival Media

Ahh, I’ve been planning to write this one for awhile: an entire article on archival quality media. As I do professional software development as well as professional photography (what a weird combination), I need archival quality CD and DVD media to store my data on.

However, one of the hardest things to is actually find good media, or even understand why it is good media. This article focuses on the history of Compact Discs, writable CD/DVD media, and why DVD+R is superior to DVD-R. If you want to just know what media is worth buying, skip to the summary at the bottom.

Short history of the Compact Disc
The invention of the Compact Disc has had a large impact on both music and computing in the last 20 years. Invented in 1979 as a joint project between Sony and Philips to counter the self-destructive nature of consumer audio playback (such as tapes and records that could only be played so many times before the recording degraded significantly) by switching to a resilient digital format.

The CD was also designed to store standard computer data, as in 1985 the first CD drives for computers were released; massive, bulky, and expensive, it was not until the mid-90s that they really took off, driven almost solely by video games and large multimedia applications.

In 1990, Sony and Philips went back to the drawing table, and then came out with the CD-R, a record-once medium. Yet again, the first CD burners were large, expensive, and bulky, but by the late 90s having a CD burner was the new ‘in’.

The first few generations of CD media, designed by Taiyo Yuden (a company who I respect, and buy all my archival quality media from), actually kind of sucked; it wasn’t until around 2000 that companies started producing very high end media.

CDs and DVDs store individual bits (encoded in various ways depending on the media) with spots of reflective and non-reflective areas. This method is called ‘pits and lands’, where pits ‘absorb’ light (ie, are ‘off’ bits) and lands ‘reflect’ light (ie, are ‘on’ bits).

With pressed media, the pressing method causes pits to reflect the laser’s light away from the sensor, and the lands to reflect it back at the sensor. With burned media, a high energy laser causes spots of organic dye to go opaque and obscure the reflective surface for the pits, leaving the organic dye for lands alone.

Short history of the DVD
While burning was becoming popular in the late 90s, so was playing high quality video on DVDs. Storing almost 7 times the data of a 700MB CD (or almost 13 in the case of dual layer DVDs), allowed companies to store massive amounts of data on one disc, leading to the movie industry to drop VHS tapes and the video game industry to drop CDs.

In 1995, the first DVD specification was ratified by over a dozen companies including Sony and Philips, as well as Thompson, Pioneer, and Mitsubishi. By 2000, at least half the homes in the US and Japan had DVD players.

So, obviously, the next step was to produce burnable DVDs. Two separate, and incompatible, efforts took hold. The first one, Pioneer’s DVD-R (pronounced ‘DVD dash R’) was released in 1997, using different data storage methods than pressed DVDs (appearing to be more like CD-R than DVD), a poor error correction scheme, and the ‘wobble’ laser tracking system of DVD-R is inadequate for the job.

The second effort, lead by the DVD+RW Alliance (headed by Sony, Philips, Mitsubishi, and Thompson) was released in 2002, as an alternative to the poorly implemented DVD-R. DVD+R uses a superior ‘wobble’ laser tracking system, a far better error correction method, and the media quality itself is typically higher. (See the ‘Why DVD+R?’ section below for a more technical explanation)

Why archival media is hard to produce
Unlike pressed CDs/DVDs, ‘burnt’ CDs/DVDs can eventually ‘fade’, due to five things that effect the quality of CD media: Sealing method, reflective layer, organic dye makeup, where it was manufactured, and your storage practices (please keep all media out of direct sunlight, in a nice cool dry dark place, in acid-free plastic containers; this will triple the lifetime of any media).

The silver and aluminum alloys used in virtually all blank CD/DVD media has one major issue, requiring the manufacturer to lacquer a protective seal over the entire disc: silver and aluminum oxidize when they hit air, turning the normally reflective layer into silver or aluminum rust. Some (very expensive) media uses gold instead which doesn’t oxidize, however DVD media cannot use gold due to design issues (not true anymore, see update 1 below). Today, only the cheapest of the cheap media has severe issues with sealing practices (as such, avoid any media made outside of Japan and Taiwan; especially avoid media made in India).

Assuming that the protective seal and reflective layer are manufactured correctly, the next issue is the organic dye. The first organic dyes, designed by Taiyo Yuden, were Cyanine-based and, under normal conditions, had a shelf life of around ten years; simply, that was simply unacceptable for archive discs. Taiyo Yuden, Mitsubishi Chemicals, Mitsui Co., and Ciba Specialty Chemicals spent the next ten years trying to produce the best organic dyes, eventually reaching archive-quality CD media.

Taiyo Yuden produced ‘Super Cyanine’, a chemically stabilized version of the original Cyanine dye designs, while TDK offers media that uses ‘metal-stabilized Cyanine’ dye, leading to similar shelf lives as Taiyo Yuden’s media. Taiyo Yuden states their Super Cyanine dye is chemically stable for at least 70 years, and TDK states their metal-stabilized Cyanine is also stable for 70 years.

On the other hand, Mitsubishi went in a different direction and produced what is called a Metal Azo dye, that they claim is stable for around 100 years. Azo dyes are chemically stable, however, the shelf life of media using Azo dyes typically does not exceed that of Super Cyanine and metal-stabilized Cyanine.

The third dye produced for CD media is called Phthalocyanine dye, with the majority of such dyes produced by Mitsui and Ciba. Typically marketed as more resistant to heat and UV radiation than Cyanine and Azo, modern Cyanine and Azo dyes last just as long in extreme conditions.

DVDs also use similar dyes, however manufacturers have intentionally kept what dyes they use a secret (instead of a feature in their marketing of the media), and all blank DVDs are intentionally the same color (as different dyes on CDs make blanks different colors, however, it is not indicative of what dye is used due to some manufacturers using different colored silver alloys and non-reactive additives in the dye).

Why Taiyo Yuden media, and how to buy in the US
The best discs in circulation tend to be Taiyo Yuden media. In Japan, you find their media under the brand That’s, which are wholly owned by Taiyo Yuden.

As of late 2009, Taiyo Yuden announced they were buying the JVC Advanced Media brand, and making it a wholly owned and operated brand for TY products. They did this to put Taiyo Yuden products on store shelves worldwide. See update 4 at the bottom for a full explanation.

Simply put, I have never had problems with any kind of Taiyo Yuden media. Ever. I have bought CDs and DVDs under a dozen different brands (including non-Taiyo Yuden manufactured TDK and Verbatim), and the only ones that have had a 100% success rate is Taiyo Yuden.

If you cannot find any company selling media under the Taiyo Yuden/JVC Advanced Media brand, I suggest buying from the SuperMediaStore.com, who offer a wide range of Taiyo Yuden CD media, DVD-R media, and DVD+R media. I tend to buy just from them, as they are the only company that guarantees that their media is actually from Taiyo Yuden and not a fake (see the above linked FAQ on information about fake Taiyo Yuden media).

Why DVD+R?
This is the most technical section of the article. If you don’t understand the basics of how CD/DVD media works, or find such technical discussions boring, skip to the next section.

As I said earlier, DVD-R sucks for data preservation for three reasons: inferior error correction, inferior ‘wobble’ tracking, and the fact its data writing methods look like an un-needed halfway point between CD-R and DVD+R. The wobble tracking I shall explain first, then the error corrections method, then the specifics of ATIP/pre-pit/ADIP optimum power settings.

For a CD/DVD burner to track where it is on the disc, it uses three things: the ‘wobble’ of the data track (where it actually wobbles back and forth instead of in a straight line) to tell where it is in the track, the position of the track to tell where it is on the disc, and some additional information on the disc to tell where the track (singular, as CDs and DVDs only have one track, and it is written in a concentric spiral) begins and ends.

This additional information on a CD-R is called the ATIP (Absolute Time In Pregroove), which contains how long the track is, where it begins, what the maximum and minimum writing speeds are, what formula dye it uses, who actually made it, optimum power control settings, and error correction data. The ATIP is stored as a frequency modulation in the wobble itself.

However, since the wobble changes subtly to encode data, it is impossible to use with the small size of tracks DVD requires, as electric noise in the laser pickup and wobbles introduced by the electric motor spinning the disc, these could easily be read as frequency changes in the real track itself.

On DVD-R, they tried to solve the problem with something called ‘pre-pits’ where spikes in the amplitude of the wobble appear due to pits fully out of phase with the rest of the track (ie, between two spirals of the track, where there is no data). This can be viewed as a simple improvement over CD-R as it makes it easier to track the wobble (since the wobble is constant except for the easy to detect and remove spikes).

Unfortunately, this method as one flaw: due to electric noise in the laser pickup, it would be very easy to miss the pre-pit (or read one that wasn’t actually there) if the disc were damaged or spun at fast speeds. The time to read a pre-pit is 1T (roughly .0000000038th of a second), which even for a computer can be easy to miss. DVD-R traded hard to track frequency changes for hard to read wobble-encoded data.

On a DVD+R, however, they came up with a much better method. Instead of changing the frequency of the wobble, or causing amplitude spikes in the wobble, they use complete phase changes. Where CD-R’s and DVD-R’s methods make you choose between either easy wobble tracking or easy ATIP reading, DVD+R’s method makes it very easy to track the wobble, and also very easy to encode data into the wobble. DVD+R’s method is called ADIP (ADdress In Pre-groove), which uses a phase change method.

With ADIPs’ phase changes, the direction of the wobble changes and continues on going in the exact opposite direction (ie, counter-clockwise to clockwise, or the reverse). For example, if the wobble was ‘going up’, the phase change causes it to instantly reverse direction start ‘going down’ no matter where it in the wobble cycle. The phase change is very easy to detect, and also continues for a set period (in this case, one 32T section of the track, or 32 times longer than the pre-pit method of DVD-R).

The state of the phase change (clockwise or counter-clockwise) encodes the individual bits in each block In essence, with the phase change method, not only do you have an easy way of tracking the wobble, but you now have an easy way of reading wobble-encoded data.

As I mentioned earlier, this wobble-encoded data includes error correction of wobble-encoded data itself. Error correction is the most important part of media, because if it does not work, then you’ve lost your data, even if there is nothing seriously wrong with the disc.

The DVD-R specification states that for every 192 bits, 64 of them are not protected under any scheme, 24 of them are protected by 24 bits of parity, and the last 56 bits are protected by another 24 bits of parity. This weird (to put it mildly) scheme allows you to easily scramble or lose 25% of the data that is required to read your disk! This information is almost more important than the actual data burned on the disc itself.

The DVD+R specification, however, states that for every 204 bits of information, it is split into four blocks of 52 bits containing 1 sync bit to prevent misreading because of phase changes, 31 bits of data, and a 20 bit parity (that protects all 32 bits of data). The sync bit is always the same value in all four blocks, and exists only to prevent phase inversions.

Now, the third item on the list: how DVD+R discs burn better. As I said earlier, ATIP/pre-pit/ADIP stores information about optimum power control settings. This information is basically formulas stating how much output power is needed, what the laser startup power should be, and other pieces of information you require to properly burn a DVD.

Optimum power control output is dependent on three things: burning speed, laser wavelength, and information given to the drive about the media. DVD-R basically fails on all three accounts because DVD+R simply includes far more information about the media in the ADIP data than DVD-R does in it’s pre-pit data.

DVD+R includes four optimum profiles, one for four major burning speeds (usually 2x, 4x, 6x, and 8x, though this can change as speeds increase). Each of these profiles include optimum power output based on laser wavelength, more precise laser power settings, and other additional information. With this information, any DVD+R burner can far more optimize it’s burning strategy to fit the media than it can with DVD-R, consistently providing better burns.

For comparison, DVD-R includes one profile, optimum power output based for that one profile only and uncalibrated towards what wavelength it is for, less precise laser power settings, and no other additional information. Typically, DVD-R burners have to already know how to burn a certain piece of media (and include this information in their firmwares) before they can properly burn to it. New media often is not properly supported.

In addition to the optimum power control profiles, DVD+R also gives four times more scratch space for the drive to calibrate the laser on; more space can only improve the calibration quality. So, in short, DVD+R media exists to simply produce better burns and protect your data better.

And finally, the end of the article…
Finally, after roughly three pages of technical discussion, we arrive at the end of my dissertation on archival quality CD/DVD media. So, you’re probably now wondering, in simple terms, what media do I recommend?

To begin with, I do not recommend CD-RW, DVD-RW, or DVD+RW media in any form for permanent storage. This is mostly a no-brainer, but those discs are meant to be able to be changed after burning, and they are simply unsuitable for long-term archival storage. I also do not recommend DVD-R media due to DVD+R’s superior error correction and burning control.

That said, I recommend Taiyo Yuden media across the board. Taiyo Yuden currently manufactures 52x CD-R, 16x DVD-R, and 16x DVD+R media in normal shiney silver, inkjet printable, and thermal printable forms. Taiyo Yuden may be one of the most expensive (if not the most expensive), but their media quality is unsurpassed. Also, as I mentioned earlier, I recommended buying from SuperMediaStore.com as they are the only online US distributor that guarantees that their Taiyo Yuden media is certified as coming from Taiyo Yuden.

So, what am I using? Due to Taiyo Yuden’s superior media quality, and DVD+R’s superior design, I use only Taiyo Yuden DVD+R media. I recommend this media to everyone who wishes to keep their data for a long, long time.

Update 1: It seems MAM-A and Kodak actually has managed to make a gold DVD, though no one else seems to be manufacturing them (Taiyo Yuden/JVC Advanced Media now makes an archival gold disc, see update 6). However, MAM-A’s gold archival media still doesn’t seem to exceed TY quality (although Mr 60,000 in the comments below puts TY second best to MAM-A). Due to the extreme cost of gold archival media ($2+ a disc) with very little increased protection (if any), I’ll still say TY media is better. I want to see more independent tests on this before I change my recommendation.

In addition, I’d like to mention that Verbatim has been relabeling other brands of disc as their own. If the box/spindle/cakebox the discs come in don’t say they’re manufactured with Verbatim’s proprietary Azo dye (sometimes called Advanced Azo, sometimes not, depending on the product) then they aren’t Verbatim media at all and should be avoided as they may not meet typical home archival standards.

Update 2: (Sept. 19th 2007) Its almost been a year since I first wrote this article. My recommendations for media have not changed, my recommendations for DVD burners have.

Samsung: Samsung is currently producing two drives worth owning, the
Samsung SH-S222AB (SATA). They’re not considered archival grade, but they’re not bad.

TEAC: TEAC makes an archival drive that is ISO/IEC10995 compliant, and is very expensive. Comes in two forms, external USB DV-W5000U and internal SATA DV-W5000S. I’ve seen DV-W5000U drives for sale for $500, and refurbished DV-W5000S drives for $150-200. This is the elite of drives, and recommended if you’re very serious about 30+ year archival storage.

Update 3: (July 26th 2009) Its been awhile since I updated this article. Pioneer is no longer manufacturing drives worth using. Just buy a Samsung or TEAC drive like I link to above. I’m using two Samsung drives now after my PX-716 finally died after years of service.

My recommendation on TY and Verbatim hasn’t changed, and I imagine it will never change; DVD media will not change significantly from here on out. Bluray in my opinion is not worth switching over to unless you’re storing data that can be measured in hundreds of gigabytes, and at that point you might want to look into archival tape storage.

When Bluray is worth switching over to, I’ll write a follow up article to this one. High quality single layer media will have to drop below 50 cents a piece and Bluray burners will have to become ubiquitous (much like DVD burners are now) before that happens. I’m thinking 2011 or later.

Update 4: (August 3rd 2010) Taiyo Yuden has bought the JVC Media brand and is now operating under the JVC Advanced Media brand. You can now buy TY inside JVC boxes and get your usual TY quality. This site has the conversion of part numbers.

JVC has not bought Taiyo Yuden, and Taiyo Yuden is in full control of this new venture. They merely bought they name so they can put TY products on store shelves worldwide.

SuperMediaStore.com is selling almost all JVC Advanced Media branded TY products in place of the old TY branded ones.

Update 5: (September 27th 2011) A few people have asked about how PIE/PIF scans work.

DVD-R and DVD+R both employ two stage error correction.

PIE (Parity Inner Error) just means error correction was used, PIF (Parity Inner Failure) means the error was unrecoverable using the inner ECC block but still may be recovered using the outer ECC block . On tools that give avg/max/total, max PIE values above 140, or max PIF values above 4* means the disc needs to be replaced but the data most likely isn’t corrupted yet**.

For a burn to be considered still pristine you want max PIE below 20 and max PIF 3 or lower.

Discs will NOT be pristine after 5 years, but there is a fall off of PIF/PIE increasing after 6 months and doesn’t seem to start picking up again until 5-10 years depending on storage environment.

Totals for PIF can be as high as 100k yet have a max of 20, and total PIF can be as high as 1000 but have a max below 3. Max PIE is considered mostly fatal above 280 and can reach as high as 1664, and max PIF can reach as high as 208*.

DVD+R generally will maintain lower values for both due to superior error correction techniques.

* Some tools and/or drives won’t list above 4 for PIF.

** Some tools and/or drives also list PO (Parity Outer) uncorrectable errors. This is for any read that has a max PIF above 4. This indicates a mostly unrecoverable data corruption error, which would effect (if I’ve done my math right) 36k of data (although that doesn’t mean the whole 36k of data is corrupted, just that its corrupted inside of that 36k). This still does not indicate the disc is unreadable, some obsessive ripping tools will try multiple reads in an effort to get a valid read or different incorrect reads that can be merged into a valid read.

Also, a few people have asked when I’m going to write that Bluray follow up article. I don’t think Bluray is viable for long term archival storage yet. I continue my recommendation that if you need to store hundreds of gigabytes of data or more, consider archival tape.

Comments

I have read this article and its comments, but am surprised to see no reference to the Century Disk. This disk is a glass disk, where the digital info is directly written by means of etching. After that the pattern is covered by a thin layer of gold. The Disk was manufactured by Plasmon-MT in Caen, France and as far as I know they still produce it. The Century Disk was used by Nasa for one of its Mars missions

It seems the company went under, and it also looks like its just yet another generic gold CD. Not particularly interesting, I’m only interested in discs that are produced in the millions and repeatedly are proved to be stable and long lasting.

Also, they never seem to have produced a DVD version, the double polycarbonate layer of DVD design improves stability and viability several fold as you only have to seal the very edge of the disc, instead of the whole top of the single disc.

Thanks for the extremely helpful and well-presented info. I want to buy some Taiyo Yuden CD-R’s, but I live in the UK. Do you happen to know a reliable retailer on this side of the pond?

Also, do you happen to know if there’s any meaningful differences between the full-face silver and the non-full-face (the ones with the clear plastic in the middle) silver media? Any advantages of one over the other, or is it purely cosmetic?

Hi. I just recently recorded 4 copies each onto Maxell DVD+r discs of all my sons 1st year pictures and videos…. Quite a large stack of discs… Anyways there was an article in todays newspapers that for storing photos long term to use gold dvds… I started looking into it and that is how I came across your website…. Based on what I have read, do you now recommend that I record them again onto TY discs? They are kept in my banks vault for storage… Thank you… Can I just make one disc and copy that disc or how many copies would you recommend making? Thank you… Tanya

I ended up building my own external hard drive. See here. A then new Samsung F3EG 2TB 5400rpm (that product has been replaced with the new F4EG 5400rpm series) and a Vantec NexStar 3 USB3 enclosure (stick with the new USB3 ones even if you don’t have USB3 yet in your computer).

I highly recommend you use a Samsung 5400rpm drive in any external drive you end up building, 7200rpm drives just get too warm and can fry the drive in an enclosure.

Thank you so much for the reply…. The external hard drive info is over my head though… lol….. Is there one you can recommend I can just buy for long term photo/video storage? I ordered the TY discs you recommend and you really feel like they will last 30 years at least as long as they are stored properly? Thank you again!!!! Tanya

I really don’t recommend buying already assembled external drives. They either use low quality drives and/or they use enclosures that cannot properly protect or cool the drive. This is why I built one myself.

Its easy to do it, just buy the drive and enclosure I recommended, slide the enclosure’s tray out, put the drive in, and push the tray back in. All done.

Yeah, either use a fine line Sanford brand Sharpie, a CD marking Sharpie, or a CD marking pen from a good brand like Verbatim. They should stick to thermal printable discs fine, just make sure you don’t smear it before drying.

Patrick,
I have just bought a pack of 10 JVC 1-16x DVD-R. I have also managed to confirm these as being manufactured by Taiyo Yuden (at least according to Wikipedia, “GHxxxxxx”).
In short, I plan to use these for permanent storage. Should I take them back and buy DVD+R discs? Would burning at the lowest speed possible make any difference?

TY DVD-R still has the very high quality of TY products, I just prefer DVD+R because of the better design of the specification that I’ve detailed in the article. Its up to you to switch, but I would have bought the DVD+R to begin with.

NEVER burn at lowest speed. I follow a simple rule: Never burn TY and Verbatim faster than fastest speed, never burn other brands faster than second highest speed, never burn faster than the DVD burner’s second highest speed. So, 16x TY in a 20x drive is fine at 16x, 16x TY in a 16x drive is fine at 12x, etc.

Patrick
Thank you for the useful information regarding archiving. Do you have any preference between the 8x or 16x DVD+R disks of Taiyo Yuden? Regarding storing the individual DVDs in acid free containers, how do you propose storing them inside the container – paper sleeves or plastic sleeves or just place them one over the other inside the box?

I recommend using actual jewel/DVD cases made of acid free non-oily plastic (usually polypropylene), paper/plastic sleeves tend to scratch the disc. Never stack discs, even in cases that allow it, as that scratches discs too (sometimes even worse, causing radial scratches due to discs spinning). You can get DVD cases that hold 6 or 8 discs without stacking.

Thanks for getting back on this. Now when it comes to cases, the problem is that a typical DVD case is bulky and becomes a space issue when you try to store hundreds of DVDs inside a box and that can be one of the reasons why sleeves are popular. Do you have any recommendation of the polypropylene dvd cases that are compact and available in the market. I found this one on the internet which has a 8 disc case -http://www.sleevetown.com/dvd-case-multi.shtml but I am not sure if this is something you would recommend. It would be great if you can let us know the one you use or recommend. Some of the forums talk about tyvek cases and something called d_skin (protective layer around the cd/dvd) but would like to know your opinion about them.

Supermediastore sells cases identical to those Diskkeeper cases, and I think cheaper too.

I don’t like Tyvek sleeves, although they’re much better than paper ones. Its a DuPont technology that is used in home construction, light low grade hazmat suits, and shipping envelopes. However, Tyvek sleeves still contact the disc surface abrasively when you slide it in and out of the sleeve. Same does for d_skin (which some have described as a disc condom of sorts).

Jewel case type designs hold the disk in the case around the hub, and doesn’t touch (or non-abrasively touches in very slim cases) the surface. This is essentially why I prefer them. Its not like it takes up much space, 12 discs in a DVD case is very small.

Do you think there is any difference in the longevity of BD-R single layer vs BD-R DL dual layer?

JVC has 3 distinct grades of DVD+R on their website http://jvc-media.com/dvd/dvd_plus_r/ – photo, premium, and archival. Archival doesn’t seem to be available in the US. Are there any real differences between the 3 in terms of quality / longevity? Thanks.

In your article on choosing cd/dvd archival disks you say the Taiyo Yuden cds are expected to last 70 years or more. Other sites make similar claims, however I haven’t been able to find where Taiyo Yuden makes this expectation itself.

Where and when did Taiyo Yuden make this statement? I would like to read it first hand.

I can’t find it on their site, but their site isn’t for consumers. I suspect its in their PR materials they hand out to vendors, which also isn’t on their website.

However, to be fair, the only way to get 70 years is lock them away in a humidity and temperature controlled archive room. Real world usage is going to be around 20 as long as they are kept temperature and humidity stable and away from UV light and rarely handled. Excessively high temperature or humidity will degrade discs faster, and you also want to maintain multiple off-site backups of important data just in case a disc starts degrading or is otherwise lost or damaged.

I can’t recommend one. They all suck, and it is extremely hard to recover VHS suitably. You probably want to try to find a professional to do it for you, VHS tape is hard to clean up, very low quality.

For today’s companies and organizations, ensuring that data is maintained properly and made available to employees and users is an essential consideration. The traditional way of doing this is through a physical DVD archive. However, there are some compelling reasons that you should ditch the disks and go virtual. What incentives might you find to get rid of your physical library, though?

I am looking for good quality achiveable disks to save family & travel photos and video on as a backup to both the computer and our external hard drive. Thank you for your great advice on which ones to get, it definitely takes the headache out of trying to figure this out, when we are not very techy. I found the DVD+R disks from Taiyo Yuden on the website you recommended, but they listed a few options that I wasn’t sure about. They listed a Silver Lacquer printable, White Inkjet Hub printable, Shiny Silver Thermal, and a silver inkjet printable. Wondering if you could point me to the best option here? Knowing that it is to save photos and vidoes with the potential of needing to print something off of them in the future, which would you recommend? I appreciate your time & knowledge on this!

It depends entirely on how you intend on labeling them. If you have a inkjet printer with a CD tray, you get the inkjet white ones. If you have an inkjet printer /w CD tray and it has white ink (very few do, most are dedicated to transparencies and CD printing), you get the silver inkjet printable.

Everyone else gets silver lacquer (usually the cheapest) and use a real Sanford brand Sharpie on it, and make sure you don’t accidentally scratch it off before it dries.

Once you transfer the data off 8mm tapes and digitize the data for storage on DVDs, the data remains exactly the same no matter how many times you copy it or burn it to discs (as long as the integrity of the data remains intact). Digital data is an all or nothing endeavor.

TY discs will maintain the integrity of the digital data much longer than Maxell, but the initial burn to both should be a mathematically provable exact identical copy.

Not particularly, however BD drives in computers are not ubiquitous yet, so having a backup that can’t be read everywhere isn’t a particularly good situation.

Also, BD-R has not been around long enough to verify longevity claims on current media. I have no doubt that TY makes the best BD-R media, but there is no current reason to believe it will last as long as DVD-R.

Thank you. But, is there any evidence now that supports the opinions that the 8x disc is actually a better quality media (longevity and burn quality)than the 16x disc?

It seems like a lot of this opinion was from a few years ago and maybe some people just held onto the “old standby” excellent TY 8x. But even today, some believe the 16x disc are slightly less better. They site AZO vs. “hybrid AZO”, and a bunch of other stuff.

I’m waffling between buying one or the other, mostly for important data backup. Cost and speed are not an issue, longevity and correctness are. These ideas of 8x maybe being superior is causing analysis paralysis!

I know you rehash these things over and over. It’s tough to collect and digest good internet info. Thank you.

It was indeed mostly people complaining that TY changed the formula. The formulas are almost identical, it was merely a tweak to improve it for 16x burning.

TY still manufactures 8x just because some people just don’t like the newer media, or they buy it for compatibility reasons.

Its really up to you. I’m still chewing through my last 8x spindle. Its not like 8x burning is really slow or anything. Its kind of a waste to buy 16x if you’re just going to burn it at a slower speed when you can buy the slower speed cheaper.

Last question, I hope. How does all this discussion pertain to just copying data files to TY DVD+R (no video)for back up purposes?

If I copy data files (no movies)to a 8x DVD on a PC with a 16x burner using Windows, can I even control the burn speed? I did find reference to “slow,medium,fast” adjustment in Windows with no reference to numerical speed.

In the above scenario, would the burner recognize the 8x media and adjust accordingly, or would it try to burn at 16x?

What if I want to copy at 4x on the 8x media? Select “slow or medium”? With data and Windows, can I, or does need exist, to select speed.

No one uses the built in burner software in Windows, it doesn’t even know how to check disc integrity after burn apparently. Although I quit Windows over a decade ago, Vista/7 burning is on my hate list.

Go use something like InfraRecorder instead, I’m not a Windows user but a lot of people like it.

Also, as a side note, video isn’t special. The kind of DVDs you buy with movies on them are just a collection of normal files on a standard file system.

I did an internet search of 8x vs. 16x DVD+R quality. You say there is little significant difference(for me archive life and copy quality matters). Most discussions are 2-5 years old.

There seems to be a slight consensus that 8x are actually better quality DVDs. For instance, this guy’s opinion is mirrored by many:

“Even the finest 16x is more difficult to burn well than 8x. 16x requires more laser power and can wear down your burner a little quicker than 8x. The 8x, especially TY or Verbatim, is thought to have an edge over 16x in archival storage and playback compatibility. If using a standalone DVD recorder, 8x is vastly preferable to 16x for any number of reasons, but if you are burning on a PC with a reasonably new burner and good burning/authoring software the only real difference between TY 8x and 16x will be the 16x burning faster and the 8x being arguably more stable in long term storage.”

I am especially interested concept of storage life. HAS ANY NEW INFO SURFACED REGARDING THIS?

My delemma: my PC has a 16x burner (you advise to use 1 or 2 speed down). Yet, the write speed difference between 8X and 16x is negligable, 1-2 minutes). If 8x DVD’s are ANY better as the geeks propose, then the choice is simple. Your thoughts?

What you are quoting is partially correct, there was a huge discussion on one of the boards awhile ago (can’t find it, a few of the boards that cover this have died since then so it might have went down with the ship). I have a rule that I never burn at a burner’s maximum speed, when TY 16x media came out, 16x drives were the fastest, thus I would have never burned 16x media at 16x to begin with. Now that 20/22/24x burners are common, burning at the full 16x is fine.

TY 16x discs burned on 16x drives at 16x is “okay”, but you often have worse PIE/PIF scores, which is what a lot of burnable media aficionados were complaining about. Some people claimed TY’s first batch of 16x discs were not up to TY’s usual quality (due to different dye formula to improve 16x burning), but there would have been no way to test that at the time, since no one owned >16x drives at the time.

There is also the case that drives may have not had a burning profile for TY 16x discs (since they would have come out after 16x drives were manufactured, and the profile is stored in the drive’s firmware). However, TY designed the 16x discs to have the same performance while burning and work fine with the older profile at slower speeds on drives that predate 16x.

In your case, yeah, I’d burn at 12 or 8x. You may think the difference is negligible, but it increases burn quality greatly. Either that, or buy a new drive.

I’ve written here some time ago, regarding cd-rs that deteriorated in a very short period of time. I mainly used TDK discs, and they turned out to be terrible. As you told me before, the burn speed was critical, and although they all played well to begin with, many would not play after a year or two. Thankyou for your help and recommendations. I now use JVC-Taiyo Yuden.
Now though, I have found that many recorded DVD-Rs will now not play.
Years back, I always trusted TDK for audio tapes. I continued on using TDK DVD-Rs. THAT WAS A BIG MISTAKE !
In the case of DVD-Rs, the record speed was not the problem, but I believe it is due to storage temperature and humidity.
I now realise that TDK do not actually manufacture recordable DVDs.
As for 16x discs, I normally burn at 8x on my computer.
I believe that recorded discs must be stored at a very restricted temperature and humidity (and kept in the dark!)
The worst TDK disc seems to be the printable ones, and if you do print on them, there seems to be far more failures.
TDK discs are manufactured in different plants, but the worst plant in India, is the discs that are numbered ‘TTH02’.
These discs are terrible, and I recommended nobody to use them.
In future, I will be using TDK-Taiyo Yuden DVD-Rs.
Now, since USB external hard-drives are now getting cheaper, I would recommend everyone to backup all their DVDRs to the hard-drive.
A 2TB hard-drive will back-up approx. 350 recordable discs.
I am now going thru my archive, and hope that I have not lost too many recordings.
By the way, I think TDK should compensate me for lost recordings !

I would like to broadcast this loudly !
Alot of people are buying these inferior discs and it is not being publicised enough.
If you have a recording that you wish to keep, everyone should know the situation.
If you have a treasured recording (possibly one you made on cam and can not duplicate), then everyone should know that alot of DVDRs will NOT last (even though some say that they will for 50-70 years!)
Remember MISSION IMPOSSIBLE…….’this tape will self-destruct in the neyt five seconds’.
Well, most discs last longer than that, but some self-destruct in under 2 years !!

Thanks for this great topic. Whild a little off topic, I’m also interested in anticipating what should be done to preserve very LONG TERM media when the platforms may have changed. For instance, if you were to seal media in a ‘time capsule’ now to be opened in a hundred years, what form would you use if you wanted to include thousands of photos? Could anyone in the even near future (tried to find a 1 inch video tape player lately?) even play a perfectly preserved DVD? Solid state drives?

DVDs won’t last longer than 25 years reliably (I don’t care what they advertise). SSDs and fash drives wont last longer than 5-10, and very crappy flash drives have been known to go completely blank after only a year.

There have been some very notable government studies on how to preserve data after the end of society (post WW3, etc), and anything outside of chiseling it on stone has come up short.

So yeah, anything but printed material won’t last past the 100 year mark. Its kinda sad.

will dvd last longer than 25 years if i use ty achiveable disks dvd+r and store them without use. also i would like to also have dvd that i can watch once or twice a year. should i use the same dvd or can you suggest something different.

Yeah, I mentioned it a few comments back. I have no real doubts about TY BD-R quality, but not enough people have adopted BD-R, nor are BD drives in computers considered ubiquitous yet. I was supposed to be handling it by now, but the market moved slower than I anticipated.

After reading your excellent article several years ago, I began using JVC/TY archival-grade 16x DVD+R to archive hi-resolution digital camera captures of art works in the collection of a major art museum. About 4 months ago, I switched to DVD-R (same formulation), because DVD+R were unavailable. Now, I cannot locate even these. The best option seems to be JVC premium grade. Any suggestions?

Scratch proof is of value only if you plan on handling the discs often (such as keeping CDs in the car for playing music). Archival discs should be rarely handled, so the chances of developing scratches are nill as long as you take care of them.

I buy silver thermal lacquer because I don’t inkjet print on them and use a Sandford Sharpie to write on it (just make sure you don’t scratch it off or smear it before it dries).

We do handle the discs often, because they are the only recourse when a client needs a digital file from us. We keep one copy of each disc in our office for such purposes; a second copy is stored in our institution’s archives as backup. Of course, we would like to have our image files on-line, but we currently have over 2500 DVD’s, and we’re a not-for-profit, so $$ for storage is limited.

Is there a comparison somewhere between archival grade and premium grade?